Liberdade

Rotinas e rupturas do escravismo no Recife, 1822-1850

Bibliographic Data

ID2827765
AuthorsK Russell Lohse (The University of Texas at Austin), Kathrin Lohse (The University of Texas at Austin, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume80
Issue1
Pages211-212
Publication date2000-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-80-1-211
OpenAlexW1592907102
LanguageEN
Citations received25

In this ambitious work, Marcus J. M. de Carvalho examines the changing meanings of slavery and freedom in a major city in northeastern Brazil. The contexts of the long-term decline of the sugar economy, the imminent closure of the African slave trade, the political struggles of the early nineteenth century, and rising opposition to slavery itself make Recife a fascinating setting for a study of slave resistance. Recife’s contaminated water supply allowed some urban slaves a freedom of movement unusual even by the standards of other Atlantic ports. Slave canoemen constantly traveled outside the city for fresh water, exchanging news and rumors from the countryside with the domestic slaves and sailors who awaited their return. In their varied movements and occupations, wage-earning negros de ganho and enslaved marketwomen developed extensive skills and social contacts through which they sometimes acquired freedom. Other slaves took advantage of the northeast’s continual political upheaval to disappear into the armed forces or escape to a nearby quilombo.Although many slaves did flee, Carvalho stresses that most struggled for degrees of self-determination even in bondage. He contends that daily negotiation and conflict with masters indicated not slaves’ accommodation but hard-won “steps on the road to freedom” that might someday be turned to flight. To illustrate his argument, Carvalho approaches some familiar sources with innovative methodology, as in his creative reading of fugitive slave advertisements. When a master wrote that he suspected a runaway of changing his name to seek work as a free artisan, he did not air groundless speculation but described a strategy slaves used to increase their independence even as captives. To assume a free identity and earn wages for oneself, even temporarily, made a mockery of masters’ pretensions to total domination (and of some historians’ claims that slaves became mere objects through coisificação). As the notices demonstrate, some slaves permanently transformed these pretenses of freedom into reality; others adopted them only for a time, but not without strengthening their own sense of independence and weakening their masters’ control. Such insights lead Carvalho to challenge the viability of absolute distinctions between slavery and freedom to describe a hierarchical society where few individuals entertained illusions of complete autonomy.In his focus on slave agency, Carvalho contributes to a rich tradition of recent scholarship on slave resistance in other Brazilian regions by other authors, namely, João José Reis, Silvia Lara, Sidney Chalhoub, and Hebe Mattos de Castro. Regrettably, much of the documentation that has allowed these researchers to examine the daily lives of slaves in other areas—testaments and inventories, manumission letters and lawsuits, civil and criminal court records—has apparently been either destroyed or misplaced in the Recife archives. Carvalho has tried to fill the gap with close readings of the newspaper accounts, censuses, and administrative reports available to him, which he informs with a broad knowledge of North American as well as Brazilian literature of slavery. Too often, however, he has been forced to substitute comparative examples and theoretical propositions for the consultation of documents deriving more directly from the experience of Recife slaves. A bibliographic note would at least have informed the reader of some of the severe handicaps Carvalho has had to confront. Finally, a fuller integration into the book’s main argument of some of the background material presented in parts 1 and 2 would have brought greater strength and coherence to the whole. These faults notwithstanding, Carvalho presents new findings and creative interpretations and raises provocative questions sure to stimulate discussion and inspire further research on this crucial region

Economics · Economy · Negotiation · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · Wage · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · History of Colonial Brazil · Law · Urban Development and Societal Issues

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